Advances in wireless and cellular technologies have led to the global spread of mobile electronic devices, such as wireless mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Such devices are designed for and sold in many markets, such as markets in the Americas, in Europe, in Asia, and in many other areas. Concurrent advances in processor speed and storage allow mobile electronic device manufactures to fit increasingly more applications and data on the devices, facilitating users of such devices in making phone calls, sending emails, messaging, and even in word processing. To accommodate such activities, mobile electronic devices often include a variety of multipurpose keys and keyboards to allow users to enter alphabetic, numeric, and other character input.
Each market has one or more languages, standard keyboards, and/or methods for text input, such as the “AZERTY” and “QWERTZ” keyboard layouts for France and Germany and the kana keyboard for Japan. A mobile phone in the European market may be configured to display menus and enter text in one of a dozen or more languages. Though mobile devices have standardized on the Touch-Tone™ keypad layout, with “ABC” on the 2 key, to support most Latin-based languages, keypad variations occur worldwide in order to support e.g. Cyrillic, Arabic, and Indic languages. Unlike desktop PC keyboards, where multiple letters and symbols for different languages may be printed on each keytop, the keys on mobile devices are too small to represent more than one or two languages.
The standards for keyboards and text input methods in each market are affected by a number of factors, including historical trends, business and government influences, literacy rates, and the availability of technology. For example, Zhuyin (BoPoMoFo) phonetic input is used in Taiwan whereas Pinyin phonetic input is used in Mainland China, but for many people in either population, handwriting recognition of the ideographic characters would be faster and easier than either phonetic method. And a new generation of people, growing up with video games and mobile phones, are as adept inputting with their thumbs as their grandparents were touch-typing on the typewriter.
Because of such regional differences, the same mobile electronic device may be produced in numerous variants, each variant having a keyboard associated with a different language, or even with a different layout within the same language. For example, one mobile electronic device may be produced such that a user can purchase the device with either an English language keyboard or a Russian language keyboard. Further, the same device may be produced with English-language keyboard layout variants, such as a QWERTY keyboard layout variant or a Dvorak keyboard layout variant. Variants of the same device may also be produced with a 12-key phone keypad, a QWERTY thumbboard, or a pair of 8-way rocker switches. The need to produce so many variants of the same mobile electronic device is a burden on producers and results in higher device costs as well as inventory and distribution headaches.